Re: C# 6.0?

Re: C# 6.0?

Thanks for the reply. NFactory is the semantics parser for the IDE. Would there also need to be changes for compilation to IL or would the in-built .NET compiler be used? In other words: The bulk of the changes are in NFactory?

Re: C# 6.0?

Currently SharpDevelop does not support compiling using MSBuild 14. It will only use up to MSBuild 12 which does not support C# 6. You can hack around this by adding the following to your project file:

<CscToolPath>$(MSBuildProgramFiles32)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin</CscToolPath>

This will allow your project to compile and use C# 6 features but you will see errors in the text editor since it does not understand C#6 syntax.

Re: C# 6.0?

I want to check out if you have any plans in roadmap to support C# 6.0 and 7.0

It will be nice to have support of newest frameworks for C#, so community can continue use SharpDevelop for their projects when they upgrade to the latest code and decide to create something from scratch.

It will be really sad to see C# 5.0 (already 5 years old) as the latest possible language version supported.

Re: C# 6.0?

There's another workaround to make SharpDevelop support building projects using newer versions of MSBuild than 12, rather than editing your project files as Matt suggests, for anyone willing to download the SharpDevelop source and build their own version. It's described here. Although like Matt's workaround, this only allows you to build using MSBuild 14, it doesn't make the text editor understand new language features added since C# 5.

From what I've read in various threads on this forum, the main thing blocking the maintainability of SharpDevelop is its dependency on NRefactory, which is the component which parses and understands your source code so that the editor can prompt you with helpful suggestions, meaning that when new features are added to the languages, support for them needs to be added to NRefactory. It sounds like NRefactory could be replaced with Rosalyn, which is Microsoft's equivalent and which is now open source, but I read somewhere an estimate that this could take 3 months for a developer working full time who already has a good understanding of the SharpDevelop code.

I too would be very sad to see SharpDevelop fall into disuse as I've been using it since version 1.x and find it much faster than Visual Studio and less prone to random crashes too.